“You told him, huh?”
“Yeah. You know.”
“You kind of liked the guy, didn’t you?”
The dealer smiles. “Yeah, Pete was okay.”
Almost despite himself, Edgerton is amused. His victim was working out on Payson Street, selling baking soda to junkies at $10 a cap-an act of unrestrained capitalism guaranteed to bring a man more enemies than can ever be put to good use. Christ, Edgerton tells himself, my luck is turning. Every doper along Frederick Avenue must have hated this sonofabitch and I find the one guy who’s a little sorry to see him dead.
“Was he out here tonight selling burn bags?” Edgerton asks.
“Yeah. Off an’ on, you know.”
“Who’d he sell to?”
“Boy named Moochie bought some. And a girl with Moochie, she lives over on Pulaski. And then these other two came by in a car. I didn’t know them. Quite a few people paid money for that shit.”
“What happened with the shooting?”
“I was down the block. Didn’t really see from where I was at, you know.”
Edgerton shakes his head, then gestures to the back seat of the radio car. The dealer climbs in and Edgerton follows, slamming the right rear door behind him. The detective cracks the window, lights one cigarette and offers another to the dealer. The kid takes the offering with a soft grunt.
“You been doing all right with me so far,” says Edgerton. “Don’t start fucking up now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve been straight with me up to this point, so I haven’t dragged your ass downtown like I normally would. But if you’re gonna hold back…”
“No, man, no,” says the dealer. “It’s not like that. I told you I saw the shooting, but I was down the street coming up from where my girl lives. I saw them chasing Pete and I heard the shots, but I can’t tell you who they were.”
“How many were there?”
“I saw two. But only one was shooting.”
“Was it a handgun?”
“No,” says the dealer, stretching his arms to the length of a long gun. “It was one of these.”
“A rifle?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“I don’t know. He was right there when I first seen him.”
“Where’d he go afterward?”
“After?”
“After Pete got shot. Where’d the boy with the rifle run?”
“Back down Payson.”
“South? That way? What’d he look like? What was he wearing?”
“Dark coat and hat, I think.”
“What kind of hat?”
“You know, like with a brim.”
“Baseball cap?”
The dealer nods.
“How was he built?”
“Average. Six feet, you know.”
Edgerton throws the last third of his cigarette out the window and reads through the last two pages in his notepad. The dealer breathes deep, then sighs.
“Ain’t this some shit.”
Edgerton grunts. “What?”
“I just talked to him a couple hours back. I told him that this shit was gonna get his ass killed. He just laughed, you know? He laughed and said he was gonna make a little money and then go buy his own shit.”
“Well,” says Edgerton, “you were right.”
At the sound of voices on the adjacent sidewalk, the dealer slumps down inside the car, suddenly aware that he has been talking on the street with a police detective for a quarter of an hour. Two young boys glide past the car and turn the corner onto Hollins Street, eyefucking the uniforms but never bothering to look into the back seat. Except for the uniforms, the intersection is once again empty.
“Let’s hurry this up,” the dealer says, suddenly uncomfortable. “A lot of people know me around here and this don’t look right.”
“Tell me this,” says Edgerton, still scanning his notes. “There had to be some people out on that corner, right?”
The dealer nods almost gratefully, content to know the price of his own noninvolvement.
“There were five or six people around,” he tells the detective. “A couple girls that live over that way on Hollins with some other boy I don’t know. I don’t know their names but I see them around. And there was another guy who I do know. He was right there when it happened.”
Edgerton flips to a fresh page of his notepad and clicks the top of his city-issue pen. With nothing else said, both men understand that the price of anonymity will be another witness’s identity. The dealer asks for another cigarette, then a light, then expels both the smoke and the name.
“John Nathan,” Edgerton repeats, writing it down. “Where’s he live?”
“I think Catherine Street, right off Frederick.”
“He deals?”
“Yeah. You all have locked him up.”
The detective nods, then closes the notepad. There is only so much cooperation that a detective can expect at the scene of a drug murder, and this kid has just exceeded Edgerton’s monthly quota. Instinctively, the dealer reaches over to close the bargain with a handshake. A strange gesture. Edgerton responds, then offers a last warning before opening the car door.
“If this doesn’t check out,” he says, sliding off the seat with the kid following him out of the car, “I know where to find you, right?”
The dealer nods agreement, then pulls the beret down on his forehead and disappears into the darkness. Edgerton takes another ten minutes to sketch his crime scene and asks the Southwest uniforms a few questions about the name he has just been given. If you see him on the street, he tells the patrolmen, pick his ass up and call homicide.
At half past three in the morning, Edgerton finally manages to get free for the four-block drive to Bon Secours and a visit with his dead man. He’s a big one, too-six-foot-one or so with a linebacker’s upper body and a tailback’s legs. A thirty-year-old addict who lived not a block from where he was shot, Gregory Taylor looks up at the ceiling of the ER through one glazed eye, the other having swollen shut from the fall on Payson Street. Catheters and tubes hang limply from every appendage, lifeless as the body to which they were attached. Edgerton notes the needle tracks on both arms as well as gunshot wounds to the right chest, left hip and upper right arm. All of the wounds appear to be entrances, though with a.22 slug, Edgerton knows, it’s hard to tell.
“He looks pretty mean, doesn’t he?” says the detective to a nearby uniform. “Big and mean. I guess that explains why there were two of them. I wouldn’t want to go out looking for this guy alone, even with a rifle. I’d definitely bring a friend.”
The physical evidence suggests two other things to the detective. One: The killing was an act of impulse rather than premeditation. Edgerton knows that from the weapons involved; no shooter with any semblance of professionalism would carry something as cumbersome as a.22 rifle to a planned drug killing. Two: The shooter was mightily pissed off at Gregory Taylor, ten shots fired being an obvious indication of displeasure.
Leaning over the dead man’s torso, Edgerton draws a human form on a fresh page of his notepad and begins marking wound sites. As he does, a heavyset trauma nurse, her face locked in that unmistakable get-out-of-my-emergency-room expression, walks across the ER, closing the plastic curtain behind her.
“Are you the detective for this one?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need his clothes?”
“Yeah, we do, thanks. There should be a uniformed officer here to bag those. I’ll see-”
“There’s one out in the waiting room with the mother,” says the nurse, obviously torn between the joys of irritation and the satisfactions of efficiency. “We’re going to need this bed soon.”
“The mother is here?”
The nurse nods.
“Okay, then. I need to see her,” says Edgerton, opening the curtain. “One other thing. He didn’t say anything in the ambulance or once he got here?”
“A-D-A-S-T-W,” says the nurse.